In Message Orientated Messaging (MOM), if an instance of a subscriber is offline when the message for the subscriber is published, the message may be cached in a durable subscriber, pending delivery until such time that the subscriber is instantiated again.
However, in some instances, a pending message may become obsolete and therefore should be recalled before being consumed by the subscriber instance.
Existing arrangements allow for the post publication deletion of messages. One such example that discloses means to delete a published message is: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13222_01/wls/docs90/ConsoleHelp/pagehelp/JMSjmsmessagedeletejmsmessagetitle.html.
However, while existing arrangements allow for published messages to be deleted, existing arrangements suffer from the disadvantage of not being able to recall unconsumed messages.
Furthermore, in existing arrangements, as neither publishers nor message brokers retain the consumption state of published messages, it is not possible to recall unconsumed message.
A need therefore exists to recall unconsumed messages. An object of the present invention is to overcome or at least substantially ameliorate these and other disadvantages of existing arrangements.